Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Her Historical Context ed. by Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Sarah Hutton (review)

Abstract

faithfully reproduce the text quoted and that his square brackets mean something different from what they do in De Rijk’s edition. This issue aside, his conjecture is superfluous, as proven by a parallel passage in LM II.2: 118. Similarly, he quotes Abelard as saying “alterum istorum [est]: vel nox vel dies” (152). The “[est]” is Lenzen’s own, again superfluous, contribution to the text. By contrast, elsewhere he proposes to insert a non at LM II.2: 64.2. This time, he explains what he is doing, and I think his conjecture is right (128n3). Again, he advances some conjectures in the footnotes, and again I think he is right (132–33). The reader is told that Abelard in his Dialectica “sich sogar eines formalen Symbols, nämlich des Äkvivalenszeichens ‘↔’ bedient” (152). If true, this would certainly justify Lenzen’s sogar, but in fact the ‘↔’ is just one of De Rijk’s expedients to clarify the text to the reader. There are no such signs in the manuscript. A nonphilologist may be excused for this type of misinterpretation of an edition, but think of the implausibility of Abelard having used such a sign without this being trumpeted forth in standard histories of logic! To judge by his several correct translations of pieces of text, Lenzen knows his Latin, but inexplicably forgets it when he thrice writes omnis corpus instead of omne corpus (87), when Necessarium ex quolibet appears as Necessarium ex quodlibet (118 and 139), and when he twice writes “quoddam lapis non est homo” for “quidam lapis non est homo” (180). A difficult passage in the Dialectica becomes “äußerst apokryph” because Lenzen takes “huic falsae consequentiae . . . ex oppositis resistitur” to mean “dass die falsche Folgerung sich den opppositis widersetze” rather than “this false consequence can be countered by an argument from opposites” (174). The quotations in the footnotes are generally correct, yet one quotation has negative adverbio for negativo adverbio (22n1), and in another one, vera separativa has become vera separative (39n6). Incidentally, in the latter case, Jacobi and Strub’s edition shows that the true reading is universalis separativa, but the scribe of the manuscript that Geyer used for his edition of the Glose had misread universalis as vera. I suppose some may find this book a useful introduction to Abelard’s logic, but it must be used with caution. S t e n E b b e s e n University of Copenhagen